This article is based on an interview with Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director, based on his presentation “How To Develop & Implement A Club’s Player Development Approach” at the 2022 USC Convention.
“Every sporting organization makes philosophical statements publicly, expresses core values, and beliefs, but very few manage to imprint this in every action. If we took away the logos, the colors, the banners, and everything was neutral, on a field we’ve never been at and with a group of players and coaches we’ve never met, running a session we’ve never seen before, would there be anything on that session that would tell you ‘yes, that’s a session from my club’? I think in most cases, most sporting organizations would honestly say ‘no’. Well, that’s what we want to accomplish, and today I’ll explain our project to make that happen” – expresses Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project Director, at the start of his presentation at the 2022 United Soccer Coaches Convention and continues – “There’s no secret sauce, the right approach or the ‘solution’, in most cases, tends to be specific to the context of the ‘problem’. Our sporting project is not an undeniable truth, it’s a project tailored to the characteristics of our club, players, and coaches, and has the objective of imprinting our club’s DNA in everything that we do, of turning words into actions. This is something that very few sporting organizations in the world have accomplished. I believe we can”.
Rush Soccer’s sporting project, in terms of technical development, is basically explained in three basic stages that run simultaneously but alternate priorities.
DESIGN / DEVELOP is the phase in which the focus was to define the club’s player development approach. “The construction of The Heart Of The Rush as our cornerstone document that summarizes our identity, a Game Model that represented the concepts that we foresee our full rounded player has mastered and that sets the basis to favor the learning process by standardizing our language, and the Blueprint to provide a base structure and progression to teach the foundations that our players will need towards dominating those concepts, that’s the framework of it all. That’s where and how we ‘line the field’. Within that framework, the curriculum itself becomes purely an example, and this is important because we don’t aim to prescribe anything but provide a context that grants the representation of our club’s DNA (example below). Within that framework, you have the liberty of expressing yourself. We wouldn’t conceive or accept a different approach than that” – explains Pablo.
IMPLEMENTATION is explained as the ongoing, predominant phase nowadays. “Once again, solutions are specific to the problems. In our case, as the largest youth soccer club in the world, operating in so many different contexts, it would be nearly impossible to always work on an individual basis. We need to use massive approaches without becoming too impersonal. Technology, for the massive side, can be very useful. The creation of Rush Soccer Development as our “one stop shop’’ platform to access all of our resources for player, coach, parent, and club development, complemented with The Rush Coaching Manual to bring our curriculum to life, are vital tools for success.
The season planner, within Rush Coaching Manual and allowing us all to create Rush specific season plans by simply answering a few questions, has a special role in this project. The challenge we are facing now is to work on an individual basis with all of our clubs to customize the implementation model. Again, solutions specific to each context” – adds the presenter.
WHAT’S NEXT?
“July 2022 will find us releasing the missing piece: The Rush Way Coaching Certificate. This is a key aspect for implementation, to help us share the message massively and assist all of our coaches in learning to use our tools.
This will all be combined, as said before, with other initiatives and in person approaches: Club visits, workshops through Select events, podcasts, webinars, among many others.
After that, it will be about ASSESSING COMPLIANCE. That’s where we want to be in 2023. Once we’ve implemented the club’s approach in most locations, it will be time for us to adopt a ‘permanent improvement’ mentality, so it’s time to assess how we do in certain areas, but always granting a consequent development plan. There’s no point in assessing if we don’t know how to help the clubs and coaches develop in those areas after, so we’ll build a team of Club Technical Developers formed by top professionals from our network that can work with each club, based on an initial assessment, for months to help them improve in the areas identified, to then reassess” – he explains.
“In our case, there are nine Key Performance Indicators we want to see all across the board:
- Coaching Training Session The Rush Way
- Coaching Games The Rush Way
- Rush Way Culture Implementation
- Rush Curriculum Implementation
- Programming to Maximize Playing Hours in U12 and under
- 70 Games Implementation & Tracking
- 6-3-1 In all teams
- Rush Way Coaching Course Compliance
- Continuous education
Ultimately, by 2024 we are aiming to start posting Rush’s Worldwide Technical Reports, through which we can bring transparency and clubs can observe how they rank in these areas in comparison to other partners” – expands Pablo to then conclude – “The last stage is to observe, as in the graph below, that this entire project forms one of the many areas that a long term well rounded club development program can incorporate. This is purely the technical side. The objective is to, long term, replicate the model to assist our clubs in other areas like HR, Marketing, or Governance, for example. It will take us time, not only to develop but to implement in such an extensive club, but we’ll make it happen, I’m confident of that”.
